The art of the conquerors
An extract from a new interview given by Annie Le Brun in Le Figaro surfaced on the @correards account on Twitter today. The journalist asked Le Brun about the “scandal” that was part of the FIAC art fair last October (Autumn 2017), when the gigantic sculpture by Dutch artist Joep van Lieshout, called “Domestikator,” depicting, in diagrammatic pre-fab steel-container architecture, doggy-style penetration between a man and what would be a four-legged animal. The sculpture was intended to be installed during the week of the art fair as part of an “off-site” program, in the Tuileries Garden, by the Louvre, within walking distance of the Grand Palais, the site of Paris’ answer to Art Basel, to Freize, and what not. The Louvre rejected the sculpture for its apparent obscenity, and so the president of the Pompidou Centre stepped in and had the sculpture installed in front of a museum, which is certainly “pas snob et très décontracté” with the Art of the Conquerors.
Here is a screenshot of the excerpt of the interview in Le Figaro:
And here is my translation:
One remembers the controversy last autumn, during the exhibition of “Domestikator” which was quite shocking. Is contemporary art stuck in an endless one-upmanship of provocation? Why?
Provocation, no doubt but it does not have any subversion.
To the contrary. It is affirming continually and ever again, an all powerful [art], similar to that of the “conquerors.” It is a better way to get us accustomed to this, with a perfect brutality that is in step with a system that is ready to destroy all that can be holding up its development. In this way, this brutality of contemporary art has an educational value, in which the cynicism consists in trying to convince us physically that there is no other reality other than this merchant totalitarianism which pretends that there is no other alternative.
Addendum July 4, 2018:
“. . . benign inocuousness seems to rule the day. . . “ —Kenny Schaffer
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